Cleanliness drive at Google: takes down 700,000 Bad Apps from Play Store in 2017
Making a 70% rise from 2016 in identification and removal of malicious apps. Google’s new machine learning models and techniques led to the removal of over 700,000 apps from the Google Play Store in 2017.
“Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier.” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.”
Identifiers like impersonation, inappropriate content, and malware were on the radar.
Impersonators or ‘copycats’ that are designed to resemble popular mainstays. Are the most common red signal for removing them from Google Play. 250,000 apps were caught that impersonated big titles, in 2017.
Inappropriate content is absolutely not entertained on Google Play store. According to the company’s definition these include pornography, extreme violence, illegal activities, and hate. Just earlier this month, the company removed 60 games from the Play Store — some of them meant for children — that were found to display pornographic ads.
Potentially Harmful Applications
(PHAs) that can cause harm to device users were also detected through machine learning and removed. Google claims that PHA installs have apparently gone down by 50 percent compared to last year. Google’s malware scanning feature has been useful in tackling this.
Google has put all of its malware scanning and detection technologies under Google Play Protect. The Android OS automatically performs scans on installed applications. To search for anything that doesn’t seem appropriate. Also users can manually scan their Android phones in the updates section for malwares.
Still, many of them find ways to escape Google’s defences. In August 2017, Google detected 30 of these which were secretly using the devices they were installed on to perform DDoS attacks. They were removed instantly.
More that 100,000 app developers who were involved in developing such malicious apps were also axed. The new machine learning technique has surely made Google play store one of the most trusted app store.
